8 Best Steamy Adult Series To Stream on Hulu
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A respectable dinner party becomes infinitely more interesting when two guests are having an affair, somebody else suspects it, and the host has just suggested everyone stay for another drink. I know exactly where the trouble is heading. I know somebody is going to make a spectacularly poor decision. Naturally, I want to watch the entire disaster unfold.
There's a wonderful difference between a show that's comfortable with sex and one that actually understands desire. Attraction can make intelligent people behave like complete idiots. It can become a bargaining chip, an escape from loneliness, or the one thing somebody desperately wants but cannot ask for honestly. Throw enough complicated adults into those situations, and suddenly staying up for another episode feels like an excellent bad decision. Here are 8 best steamy adult series to stream on Hulu.
8 'Welcome to Chippendales' (2022)
Somen “Steve” Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani) is an ambitious Indian immigrant determined to achieve the American dream when he establishes a Los Angeles nightclub featuring male strippers performing for women. Welcome to Chippendales follows the club's extraordinary rise as Steve collaborates with choreographer Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett), whose increasingly elaborate productions help turn the business into a cultural phenomenon. Unfortunately, Steve's obsession with ownership and recognition eventually becomes considerably more dangerous than the competition surrounding his club.
The strip shows are entertaining, but I became far more interested in the rivalry developing behind them. Nick understands the theatrical possibilities of the business, while Steve cannot tolerate the idea of somebody else becoming essential to his success. Nanjiani is remarkably good at making Steve's ambition turn gradually poisonous. What begins with champagne, dancers, and delighted audiences becomes an increasingly ugly crime story. I particularly admire how the series understands the irony of an empire built around pleasure becoming a source of extraordinary misery for the people running it.
7 'Fleishman Is in Trouble' (2022)
Recently divorced doctor Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) suddenly discovers that dating applications have made him remarkably desirable to women. After years of marital unhappiness, he enthusiastically embraces his new romantic freedom. Then his ex-wife Rachel (Claire Danes) disappears, leaving their children in his care and forcing him to reconsider practically everything about their marriage. Fleishman Is in Trouble also follows Toby's old friend Libby (Lizzy Caplan), whose observations gradually complicate the story we've been hearing.
I absolutely adore the uncomfortable realization that Toby's version of his marriage might be missing something important. His excitement over casual encounters initially feels understandable, especially given how bitterly he remembers his relationship. But Rachel has been living an entirely different emotional reality. Taffy Brodesser-Akner adapted her own novel, giving the series an almost painfully recognizable understanding of how married people can spend years misunderstanding one another. The sexual freedom is exciting. The real intimacy arrives when we begin understanding the loneliness everybody has been concealing.
6 'The Great' (2020–2023)
The Great introduces the young Catherine (Elle Fanning), who arrives in Russia expecting a romantic marriage to Emperor Peter (Nicholas Hoult) and instead discovers a court overflowing with cruelty, infidelity, ridiculous traditions, and astonishing political incompetence. Her disappointment gradually develops into an ambition to overthrow her husband and transform the country. Unfortunately, their increasingly complicated relationship keeps disrupting what should be a relatively straightforward political conspiracy.
I would happily watch Fanning and Hoult insult each other for another three seasons. Peter is selfish, sexually indiscriminate, childish, and somehow capable of moments that make Catherine's feelings toward him horribly complicated. Tony McNamara created a historical satire where practically everybody is sleeping with somebody politically inconvenient, and the dialogue is often filthier than the actual encounters. My favorite thing is Catherine's growing inability to separate her political ambitions from her personal desires. She wants to modernize an empire, yet one infuriating man keeps exposing just how little control she possesses over her own emotions. Huzzah, indeed.
5 'Pam & Tommy' (2022)
Pamela Anderson (Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) begin an intense romance that rapidly turns into marriage. Pam & Tommy follows their relationship as a private intimate recording is stolen by disgruntled contractor Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen) and distributed without their consent. What begins as a bizarre criminal enterprise develops into an international scandal, with the early internet making it increasingly difficult for the couple to regain control of their private lives.
The contrast between the show's exuberant early romance and the humiliation that follows is genuinely upsetting. James captures Pamela's warmth and vulnerability while demonstrating how differently the public treats her compared with Tommy. He can behave outrageously and remain a celebrated rock star. She becomes the person expected to defend her character against a violation she never authorized. The production itself has attracted debate over dramatizing Anderson's experience without her participation, which makes its subject particularly complicated. Still, I find its examination of celebrity, desire, and the commercialization of intimacy difficult to dismiss.
4 'Reasonable Doubt' (2022–)
Jax Stewart (Emayatzy Corinealdi) is an exceptionally talented Los Angeles defense attorney whose ability to navigate morally complicated cases is considerably stronger than her ability to maintain a peaceful personal life. Reasonable Doubt follows Jax through dangerous legal battles, a strained marriage to Lewis (McKinley Freeman), and relationships that repeatedly blur the distinctions between professional judgment and personal desire.
Corinealdi makes Jax ridiculously compelling because she refuses to play her as somebody who needs our approval. Jax can dismantle an opponent in court, then walk straight into an intimate situation where her confidence becomes much less useful. Her complicated history with former client Damon adds another uncomfortable dimension to an already messy marriage. Creator Raamla Mohamed understands the pleasures of an adult legal drama where nobody's romantic life conveniently stops when a major case begins. I particularly appreciate that Jax is allowed to be brilliant, selfish, desirable, and occasionally catastrophically wrong without the series demanding that we choose one description.
3 'Rivals' (2024–)
The English countryside in the 1980s becomes a battlefield of affairs, social ambition, and television-industry warfare in Rivals, adapted from Jilly Cooper's novel. Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a notorious aristocratic womanizer, becomes entangled in the rivalry between powerful television executive Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) and journalist Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner). Their professional conflict spreads through a wealthy community where almost everybody has a secret and very few people demonstrate a convincing interest in fidelity.
What a magnificently shameless show. The expensive parties, outrageous clothes, spectacular country houses, and casual betrayals all contribute to a world where reputation is valuable primarily because destroying somebody else's is so enjoyable. Yet Rupert becomes more interesting through his growing attraction to Declan's daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean). For once, his accustomed confidence doesn't provide an easy answer to what he wants. Meanwhile, Tony's monstrous hunger for control makes even ordinary professional conversations feel scandalous. I came for the deliciously inappropriate behavior and stayed because the characters gradually became much harder to dismiss as privileged idiots.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey's
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away.
- You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
- You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
- You've made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
- Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
- You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
- You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
- You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
- ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey's Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
- You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
- Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
- You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
- It's messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
- You're not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it.
- You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
- Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they're smart enough to keep up.
- The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
- You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
- You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that's not a flaw, it's a survival strategy.
- You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
- Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
2 'Tell Me Lies' (2022–)
Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) begins college hoping to escape a complicated emotional past and soon becomes involved with Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), a charming student whose behavior grows increasingly manipulative. Tell Me Lies follows their relationship across several years, exploring how their attraction gradually affects friendships, romances, and the lives of people unfortunate enough to become involved with either of them.
Stephen makes me want to throw something at the television. He has this infuriating ability to make an accusation sound like concern and an apology sound like somebody else should be grateful. Lucy understands enough to recognize his behavior yet keeps finding reasons to return. Meaghan Oppenheimer created a series that captures the addictive nature of an unhealthy relationship with almost embarrassing accuracy. The intimate scenes feel convincing because the chemistry is real, even when the emotional consequences are awful. And watching the damage spread through their college friend group becomes increasingly fascinating. I have rarely wanted two fictional people to stay away from each other more desperately while remaining so invested in every interaction they share.
1 'Normal People' (2020)
Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal) and Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) attend the same secondary school in Ireland, although their social positions could hardly be more different. Connell is popular and academically gifted, while Marianne is wealthy, isolated, and frequently mocked by their classmates. Their private relationship begins when Connell visits Marianne's house to collect his mother, who works there as a cleaner. Normal People follows their developing intimacy from school into university, where their changing circumstances continually complicate their feelings for each other.
That is the kind of writing that destroys me. Directors Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald bring extraordinary tenderness to the adaptation of Sally Rooney's novel. There are conversations and physical intimacy beautifully filmed to feel equally important. Mescal and Edgar-Jones make the smallest hesitation unbearable. A hand resting against somebody's skin can communicate affection that neither character knows how to express aloud. The sex is beautiful, certainly, but their desperate attempts to understand one another are what make the entire relationship so intimate. I would recommend this to anybody who has ever loved someone and discovered that love alone doesn't automatically make communication easier.
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